CloudTranslate

CloudTranslate is a self-hosted translation platform built to be run as a business. It uses neural machine translation — deep learning models that read a sentence as a whole rather than substituting phrase by phrase, which is why the output reads more naturally than the statistical and rule-based engines that came before it. Translation is powered by Amazon Translate, on your own AWS account, and the platform around it supplies the accounts, plans, gateways and dashboards needed to charge other people for the service.

The economics are the pitch. Machine translation puts the cost of a translated page roughly 1000x below what the same work costs from a professional human translator, which turns "we cannot afford to localise this" into a line item. Amazon Translate is not a budget compromise either: Intento ranked it the top machine translation provider of 2020, measured across 14 language pairs, 16 industry sectors and 8 content types.

What it translates

• 75 language pairs — from Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic and Arabic through to Vietnamese and Welsh, including regional variants that matter in practice: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Canadian French, Mexican Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Dari and Pashto, Farsi, Swahili, Tagalog and Uzbek.
• Whole documents, formatting intact — Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), Excel (.xlsx), XLIFF (.xlf v1.2), HTML and plain text (.txt). A deck goes in as a deck and comes back as a deck, rather than as a wall of text somebody has to rebuild.
• Text — straight paste-and-translate for anything up to 5,000 bytes.
• Parallel target languages — send one source into several languages at once instead of queueing the same job repeatedly.

Limits worth knowing before you price a plan

• Documents — up to 20 MB per file and up to 1 million characters in length.
• Text — up to 5,000 bytes per request.
• AWS Free Tier — 2 million characters a month free for the first 12 months, counted from your first translation request, which covers a real pilot before anything is spent.

The business layer

• Plans — monthly subscriptions and prepaid packs, created from the admin panel.
• 8 payment gateways — PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay, Paystack and Mollie for subscriptions and prepaid; Braintree and Coinbase for prepaid; and offline bank transfer for both. All of them, and every SaaS feature, are covered by the Regular License.
• Crypto — Coinbase takes Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, USD Coin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Dai on prepaid plans.
• Coupons and promo codes — discount codes for prepaid plans.
• Affiliate and referral system — referrals, earnings and payouts, included rather than bolted on.
• Finance dashboard — monthly and yearly income against estimated spend on Amazon Translate, which is the pair of figures that tells you whether a plan is priced above cost.
• Admin panel — users, plans, results and settings in one place.

Requirements worth knowing

Built on PHP 7.4 and Laravel 8.4, with comprehensive documentation. A valid AWS account is required, since Amazon Translate is the engine behind every job, and characters are billed by AWS at its own published rates — which is what the estimated-spend dashboard exists to track. The interface is fully responsive.

Ideal for

• Agencies localising client content across dozens of markets without a translator on every pair.
• Companies translating internal documentation, decks and spreadsheets for distributed teams.
• Localisation workflows already running on XLIFF that need a machine pass before human review.
• E-commerce and publishing operations translating catalogues and articles at volume.
• Founders launching a paid translation service with plans, gateways and affiliates already built.
• Support teams handling inbound messages in languages nobody on the rota reads.